February 6, 2012

Leading Exoplanet Hunters Awarded Science Prize

World-renowned Swiss astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz of the Geneva Observatory have been awarded the 2011 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences for their work on exoplanets.

The foundation recognized their groundbreaking efforts in developing “new astronomical instruments and experimental techniques that led to the observation of planets outside the solar system”. These were instrumental in the first discovery of an exoplanet around a normal star, made by their team in 1995. The discovery revolutionized astronomy and initiated an entire new field that is focused on finding and characterizing exoplanets. Since then, this field has been recognized by agencies and institutes around the world as one of the major challenges for astronomy in the coming decades.

Michel Mayor and his then PhD student Didier Queloz developed the radial velocity technique for planet detection, which looks for the wobble of a star caused by the gravitational pull of a planet as it orbits the star. Today, the radial velocity technique is still the most successful in finding exoplanets, and the only way to determine planetary masses. The pair also took part in developing the transit method, in which the passage of a planet in front of its star is detected by the dimming of the light received from the star.

Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz were also at the heart of a consortium, led by the Geneva Observatory with the help of ESO and other organizations, which developed the HARPS spectrograph, installed on ESO´s 3.6-meter telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile in 2003. HARPS has greatly contributed to the search for exoplanets with an impressive crop of super-Earths and Neptune-mass planets, demonstrating that a large fraction of the stars in the solar neighborhood host low-mass planets. HARPS was described by the award jury as the “world´s leading planet discovery machine”.

The BBVA Foundation promotes scientific research of excellence by funding research projects, disseminating the results to society through diverse channels including symposia, workshops, lectures, publications and exhibitions, and providing advanced training and research awards.

The Frontiers Awards honor fundamental disciplinary or supradisciplinary advances in a series of basic, natural, social and technological sciences. They seek to recognize and encourage world-class research and artistic creation, prizing contributions of broad impact for their originality and theoretical significance.

HARPS was designed and built by an international consortium of research institutes, led by the Observatoire de GenÃ¨ve (Switzerland) and including Observatoire de Haute-Provence (France), Physikalisches Institut der UniversitÃ¤t Bern (Switzerland), the Service d'Aeronomie (CNRS, France), as well as ESO La Silla and ESO Garching.

Image Caption: World-renowned Swiss astronomers Didier Queloz and Michel Mayor of the Geneva Observatory are seen here in front of ESO´s 3.6-meter telescope at La Silla Observatory in Chile. The telescope hosts HARPS, the world´s leading exoplanet hunter. They were awarded the 2011 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences for their ground-breaking work on exoplanets. Credit: L. Weinstein/Ciel et Espace Photos